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This chapter examines phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic data from a number of contemporary Arabic varieties spoken within historical Yemen—i.e. within the borders of current Yemen and up into southern ˁAsīr in Saudi... more
This chapter examines phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic data from a number of contemporary Arabic varieties spoken within historical Yemen—i.e. within the borders of current Yemen and up into southern ˁAsīr in Saudi Arabia—with (a) data from the Ancient South Arabian language, Sabaic; (b) what has been called ‘Ḥimyaritic’, as spoken during the early centuries of Islam; and (c) the Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri and Śḥerɛ̄t. These comparisons show a significant number of shared features. The density of shared features and the nature of sharing exhibited lead to the tentative suggestion that some of these varieties may be continuations of South Arabian with an Arabic overlay rather than Arabic with a South Arabian substratum.
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JÉRÔME LENTIN and ANTOINE LONNET (eds): Mélanges David Cohen: Études sur le langage, les langues, les dialectes, les littératures, offertes par ses élèves, ses collègues, ses amis, présentées a l'occasion de son quatre-vingtieme anniversaire. liii, 764 pp. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003. ???52more
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Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by... more
Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by Watson and Morris in collaboration with the people we thank at the end. This version was updated on 29th May 2024.
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This article examines some of the key phonological and morphological features exhibited by Arabic dialects of the Arabian Peninsula. These include features exclusive to the Peninsula such as the k-perfect attested in dialects of the... more
This article examines some of the key phonological and morphological features exhibited by Arabic dialects of the Arabian Peninsula. These include features exclusive to the Peninsula such as the k-perfect attested in dialects of the western Yemeni mountain range, and the nasal definite article, and features also attested to a greater or lesser extent outside the Peninsula. Recent research on Peninsula dialects has challenged traditional statements made about Arabic dialectology, including claims about the Bedouin sedentary dichotomy, the lateral *d, and the lack of distinction between *d and *d#,.
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This chapter is a contribution towards understanding Semitic verbal systems by presenting an analysis of new data from conservative varieties of two Semitic languages spoken in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. It discusses the verbal... more
This chapter is a contribution towards understanding Semitic verbal systems by presenting an analysis of new data from conservative varieties of two Semitic languages spoken in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. It discusses the verbal system of the Arabic dialect of the Sarqiyya region of Oman and the verbal system of the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri. The Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) are arguably the most conservative extant Semitic languages, since they preserve several features known to have existed in ancient Semitic languages that are lacking in other extant Semitic languages. The chapter begins by discussing the issue of tense and aspect in relation to Classical Arabic and the modern Arabic dialects. It considers the form, and then the function, of the different verbal inflections. Finally, the chapter examines the expression of tense and aspect in Sarqiyya Arabic and Mehri through the use of affixes and particles. Keywords: Sarqiyya; Mehri; modern Arabic dialects; Modern South Arabian language; Semitic verbal systems; tenses
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A HISTORY OF PALESTINE 634–1099. By Moshe Gil. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 968 pp.ARABIC HISTORICAL THOUGHT IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. By Tarif Khalidi. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii+250 pp. £35.00... more
A HISTORY OF PALESTINE 634–1099. By Moshe Gil. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 968 pp.ARABIC HISTORICAL THOUGHT IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD. By Tarif Khalidi. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii+250 pp. £35.00 (hb).THE HISTORY OF THE SAFFARIDS OF SISTAN AND THE MALIKS OF NIMRUZ (247/861 to 949/1542–3). By C. E. Bosworth. Costa Mesa, Mazda Publishers, 1994. 477 pp. $49.00.BADR AL‐DIN
Research Interests: History, Ancient History, International Relations, English language, Cold War, and 15 moreBritish, East Africa, Conflict Resolution, Ethnic Conflict, Los Angeles, Civil Society, Middle East, Global change, Face to Face, Economic System, History and archaeology, Mamluk, English Language, Indexation, and Line Drawings
Research Interests: History, Cultural Studies, Arabic, Linguistics, Language contact, and 4 moreLanguage Studies, Pj, P, and Arabica
The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern... more
The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in parts of the Gulf and East Africa. The estimated number of Mehri speakers is between 100,000–180,000. Following Hall (2006), this study distinguishes between two types of inserted vowels: epenthetic vowels, which repair illicit syllable structures, and intrusive vowels, which transition between consonants. The paper examines how the properties of epenthetic and intrusive vowels as proposed by Hall relate to Mehri.
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The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern... more
The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central
Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by
members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen,
parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in
parts of the Gulf and East Africa. The estimated number of Mehri
speakers is between 100,000–180,000. Following Hall (2006), this
study distinguishes between two types of inserted vowels: epenthetic
vowels, which repair illicit syllable structures, and intrusive vowels,
which transition between consonants. The paper examines how the
properties of epenthetic and intrusive vowels as proposed by Hall
relate to Mehri.
Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by
members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen,
parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in
parts of the Gulf and East Africa. The estimated number of Mehri
speakers is between 100,000–180,000. Following Hall (2006), this
study distinguishes between two types of inserted vowels: epenthetic
vowels, which repair illicit syllable structures, and intrusive vowels,
which transition between consonants. The paper examines how the
properties of epenthetic and intrusive vowels as proposed by Hall
relate to Mehri.
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∗ A wide range of modern Arabic dialects exhibit devoicing in pre-pausal (utterance-final) position.
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Werner Arnold invited me to be his Stellvertreterin during his absence from Heidelberg in the winter semester 2003 – 2004. I stayed, together with my family, for the whole year and had the wonderful experience of working with Alexander.... more
Werner Arnold invited me to be his Stellvertreterin during his absence from Heidelberg in the winter semester 2003 – 2004. I stayed, together with my family, for the whole year and had the wonderful experience of working with Alexander. Three years and three months after his death I still miss him and sometimes, when my mind is somewhere else, expect to be able to consult him on some linguistic matter or other. He had fun in his life and in his research, and I think he would have liked these enthusiastic children and their stories of games and their everyday life. Children are wonderful informants. They are full of energy and always keen to correct and repeat, where adults would have long since turned away in despair. Recording children is also very much a team activity – even when the researcher begins recording a single child, very soon others join in, or older children insist on correcting the information given by the younger child. In recent years I have recorded children in the...
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Until fairly recently most linguistic fieldwork relied on written records of spoken data or audio-only recordings. The recent increase in research focusing on audio-visual data, with emphasis on the co-expressiveness of speech and... more
Until fairly recently most linguistic fieldwork relied on written records of spoken data or audio-only recordings. The recent increase in research focusing on audio-visual data, with emphasis on the co-expressiveness of speech and gesture, has led to a greater understanding of the relationship between language, gesture and thought. In this paper, we discuss gesture and what it illuminates linguistically in two Modern South Arabian Languages: Mehri and Śḥerɛ̄t.
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This paper examines the relationship between language and nature in southern and eastern Arabia. The work is the result of a two-year interdisciplinary network between the University of Leeds and Qatar University, with partners in the UK,... more
This paper examines the relationship between language and nature in southern and eastern Arabia. The work is the result of a two-year interdisciplinary network between the University of Leeds and Qatar University, with partners in the UK, Oman, Canada, the United States, and Russia. Our hypothesis is that local languages and ecosystems enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and that the demise of local ecosystems will adversely affect local languages. In this paper, we examine some of the language–nature effects in Qatar and Dhofar, southern Oman. Our regions differ in that Qatar has two seasons, summer and winter, and is predominantly arid, with occasional rain, while Dhofar together with al-Mahrah in eastern Yemen has four distinct seasons, receiving the monsoon rains between June and September, and, as a result, is home to hundreds of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Since the 1970s, in particular, both regions have experienced some of the most rapid socio-economic ch...
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The aim of this study is to examine the challenges of handling verb tense and aspect in Arabic to English machine translation. A small corpus of selected Arabic sentences was submitted to Google Translate for a contrastive analysis of... more
The aim of this study is to examine the challenges of handling verb tense and aspect in Arabic to English machine translation. A small corpus of selected Arabic sentences was submitted to Google Translate for a contrastive analysis of Arabic and English verb tense use. The main purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of morphology and forms of Arabic and English verbs in their syntactic context, in order to reveal details that can be used in current machine processing systems.
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Arabic was traditionally described as lughat al-Ρād ‘the language of Ρād’ due to the perceived unusualness of the sound. From Sībawayhi’s description, early Arabic Ρād was clearly a lateral or lateralized emphatic. Lateral fricatives are... more
Arabic was traditionally described as lughat al-Ρād ‘the language of Ρād’ due to the perceived unusualness of the sound. From Sībawayhi’s description, early Arabic Ρād was clearly a lateral or lateralized emphatic. Lateral fricatives are assumed to have formed part of the phoneme inventory of Proto-Semitic, and are attested in Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) today. In Arabic, a lateral realization of Ρād continues to be attested in some recitations of the QurΜān. For Arabic, the lateral Ρād described by Sībawayhi was believed to be confined to dialects spoken in ДaΡramawt. Recent fieldwork by Asiri and al-Azraqi, however, has identified lateral and lateralized emphatics in dialects of southern ΚAsīr and the Saudi Tihāmah. These sounds differ across the varieties, both in their phonation (voicing) and manner of articulation — sonorants and voiced and voiceless fricatives — in their degree of laterality, and in their phonological behaviour: the lateralized Ρād in the southern Ye...
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In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity that vowel combinations which are not considered to have been standardly permitted in Classical Arabic might have occurred in certain ancient... more
In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity that vowel combinations which are not considered to have been standardly permitted in Classical Arabic might have occurred in certain ancient dialects. I draw mainly on the observations of Sibawayh, as well as more modem interpretors of the classical Arabic grammarians such as Rabill (1951) and al-Nassir (1993). Given the nature of the material which I am looking at and the relative brevity of this paper, the arguments which I present here are not intended to be anything more than speculative and exploratory.
Research Interests: History, Philosophy, Phonology, Arabic, Linguistics, and 4 moreVowel System, Diachronic, Classical Arabic, and VOWEL
The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an important computational resource for research in Arabic. The main purpose of this paper is to provide some details of morphological and syntactic structures of Arabic and English verbs through computing... more
The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an important computational resource for research in Arabic. The main purpose of this paper is to provide some details of morphological and syntactic structures of Arabic and English verbs through computing studies of their use in the Quran. The paper will also highlight some investigations into the use of a sub-verb corpus, along with translations, in order to consider how Quranic contexts employ verb forms to indicate time and how Arabic verbs are rendered into English.
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Many modern Arabic dialects exhibit asymmetries in the direction of emphasis (for most dialects, pharyngealization) spread. In a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, emphasis has two articulatory correlates, pharyngealization and labialization:... more
Many modern Arabic dialects exhibit asymmetries in the direction of emphasis (for most dialects, pharyngealization) spread. In a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, emphasis has two articulatory correlates, pharyngealization and labialization: within the phonological word, pharyngealization spreads predominantly leftward, and labialization spreads rightward, targetingshort high vowels. Since asymmetries in the directionality of spread of a secondary feature are phonetically motivated and depend on whether the feature is anchored to the onset or the release phase of the primary articulation,it is argued that the unmarked directionality of spread should be encoded in the phonology as a markedness statement on that feature.
The practice and denotation of tense and aspect differ in Arabic and English, so there is a challenge when translating between the two languages, particularly when the appropriate translation depends on a range of linguistic contexts,... more
The practice and denotation of tense and aspect differ in Arabic and English, so there is a challenge when translating between the two languages, particularly when the appropriate translation depends on a range of linguistic contexts, comprising also the context of use. In this paper, the Qur’anic Arabic corpus of verbs is used in Arabic with their English translations by building a sub-corpus of verbs. The study uses a statistical method incorporating SPSS and Kappa feature of SPSS to investigate the rate of agreement and disagreement of Quran Verb Tense and Aspect in Arabic to English translations. The aim is to provide information that can be used to address some of the challenges that arise when translating between Arabic and English. The SPSS results indicate the highest percentage for past, present and future tenses of Quranic Arabic verbs; the progressive and perfective aspect has the lowest percentage. Kappa must is used to estimate the disagreement between translations with...
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The Arabic language has not been widely studied in computational terms. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of morphology and forms of Arabic and English verbs in their syntactic context, in order to... more
The Arabic language has not been widely studied in computational terms. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of morphology and forms of Arabic and English verbs in their syntactic context, in order to reveal details that can be used in current machine processing systems.
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This volume is the outcome of two workshops held at the University of Salford, April 18th 2007 and April 7th and 8th 2008. The first of these, Relative clauses and attribution in Semitic, coincided with Jan Retso’s tenure as University... more
This volume is the outcome of two workshops held at the University of Salford, April 18th 2007 and April 7th and 8th 2008. The first of these, Relative clauses and attribution in Semitic, coincided with Jan Retso’s tenure as University Campus Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Salford February–April 2007. During this period, Jan pursued research on typological and diachronic aspects of relative clause marking in the Semitic languages. From discussions held at this time, it became increasingly clear that it would be fruitful to compare relative clause marking with two other noun phrase syntagms – genitive construction and adjectival attribution. Within the Semitic domain, these three syntagms exhibit both common and divergent syntactic, morphological and semantic properties. This raises interesting questions about typology and diachrony, on the one hand, and how to account for these syntagms within various linguistic models, on the other. In order to stimulate new thinking...
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This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data... more
This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many alternative filters and classifiers for machine learning. We experimented with several classifiers and the best accuracy was achieved using the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm for training and testing process set to three different feature-sets for each testing process. Our approach achieved an accuracy equal to 42.85% which is considerably worse in comparison to the evaluation scores on the training set of 80-90% and with training set “60:40” percentage split which achieved accuracy around 50%. We observed that Buckwalter transcripts from the Saarland Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system are given without short vowels, though the Buckwalter system has notation for these. We elaborate such obse...
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The Quranic Arabic corpus is one of the most important computational tools that has been produced in Arabic language service. Therefore, the main purpose of this papers is to provide some details of morphological and syntactic structures... more
The Quranic Arabic corpus is one of the most important computational tools that has been produced in Arabic language service. Therefore, the main purpose of this papers is to provide some details of morphological and syntactic structures of Arabic and English verbs through deep computing studies of the Quran. The paper will also highlight some investigations into the use of a sub-verb corpus, along with translations, in order to consider how Quranic contexts employ verb forms to indicate time and how Arabic verbs are rendered into English.
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The Teacher's handbook includes both a key to exercises, and extension material which the teacher can use in class
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There are three major dialect groups of Mehri: Western Yemeni Mehri (henceforth WYM); Mahriyōt, also known as eastern Yemeni Mehri; and Mehreyyet, also known as Omani Mehri. In this chapter, we argue that negation patterns in Mehri result... more
There are three major dialect groups of Mehri: Western Yemeni Mehri (henceforth WYM); Mahriyōt, also known as eastern Yemeni Mehri; and Mehreyyet, also known as Omani Mehri. In this chapter, we argue that negation patterns in Mehri result from grammaticalisation of the anaphoric negator, 1 examine negation patterns in the dialects as reflecting stages in Jespersen's Cycle of negation, and consider the extent to which morpholexical and syntactic factors influence negation patterns.
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Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trustfunded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by Watson... more
Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trustfunded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by Watson and Morris in collaboration with the people we thank at the end.
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Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by... more
Initial compilation of this bibliography was done by the investigators of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian team (Watson, Morris and Eades: RPG-2012-599), and from 2014 by Watson and Morris in collaboration with the people we thank at the end. The bibliography is regularly updated. Please do send additional references where relevant to Janet Watson. This version was updated on 15th February 2024.